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Thursday, October 20, 2011

A Nuclear Issue - The Great Shake Out In San Clemente

Potassium iodide

Tuesday night, October 18th, was at least a partial victory for
us in this final meeting the city held in a series of three meetings on
Lessons Learned from Fukushima. It was clear from the beginning that the
council would not go as far as calling for an immediate shutdown, but
we felt it was worth the effort to try to persuade them while also
informing a public largely blind to the true dangers of San Onofre. In
our awareness campaign alone, we distributed over 6000 fliers revealing
reliable and verified facts that should concern those of us living
within 50 miles of the second most dangerous nuclear power plant of all
104 in the USA. In the last four months we must have attended at least
six televised city council meetings with passionate and persuasive
requests to take action. Often we were criticized for being alarmists
and extremists, but so were four of the top independent nuclear experts
that we brought into the talks. It seemed no one wanted to hear the
truth from us or anyone else.

But then the Staff Recommendation came out shortly before the meeting
and had an alternative proposal similar to ours, citing many of the
same issues, but falling short of demanding an immediate shutdown until
after the lessons from Fukushima had been applied. We were glad to see
one statement in particular calling for a moratorium on re-licensing
until a permanent storage solution for the highly radioactive waste was
available. That shuts down any likelihood of them going past 2022, but
of course we don't think we have that kind of time to wait for the next
major quake in our area.

Coincidentally, today is the practice run for the "Great Shake Out"
which simulates a 7.8 on the San Andreas Fault, although they know that
it could easily be an 8.0 or greater, (which is twice the power of a
7.8). The death and destruction they anticipate is staggering, and even
at that, it has no consideration at all for nuclear fallout in case
there are problems at San Onofre. Perhaps it is simply incalculable.
How foolish can our planning efforts be if we anticipate a huge
earthquake with such certainty in "The Great Shake Out" but act as if
the big quake is highly unlikely when discussing vulnerabilities of a
nuclear power plant only built to withstand a 7.0?

Anyway, after a long night of deliberations we were pleased to get a
5-0 Vote for the staff recommendation which was actually strengthened by
additional language stressing urgency and a call to action for every
city in Orange County to support this effort. That was bigger than
anything we ever expected. We are very grateful to the leaders of our
city for showing the courage and wisdom of holding these meetings for us
and for reaching beyond their comfort zones to do what is right. It is
certainly quite an accomplishment in a "company town" like ours when
Edison claims to contribute over $200 million to our local economy per
year.

Next post we'll provide the details of the letters that are actually
produced by the city.
Related articles are available at the links below.